Opinion page editor Rick Holmes and other writers blog about national politics and issues. Holmes & Co. is a Blog for Independent Minds, a place for a free-flowing discussion of policy, news and opinion. This blog is the online cousin of the Opinion
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Opinion page editor Rick Holmes and other writers blog about national politics and issues. Holmes & Co. is a Blog for Independent Minds, a place for a free-flowing discussion of policy, news and opinion. This blog is the online cousin of the Opinion section of the MetroWest Daily News in Framingham, Mass. As such, our focus starts there and spreads to include Massachusetts, the nation and the world. Since successful blogs create communities of readers and writers, we hope the \x34& Co.\x34 will also come to include you.

I have not yet begun to read the new best-seller by economist Thomas Piketty, “Capital in the 21st Century,” but I may have to in order to keep up with Don and Lee and everyone else jumping into the fray.
Instead, I’ve been reading “The Guns of August” (getting a head start on the WWI centennial) and Elizabeth Warren’s new book, “A Fighting Chance.”
I just finished a part of Warren’s book where she describes her upset when she first delved into bankruptcy law and realized all the “experts” – including those who had just rewritten the bankruptcy law, had no data about who filed for personal bankruptcy and why. They had theories and biases – mostly that those who filed for family bankruptcy protection were irresponsible people with character flaws – but they had no data to back it up. Nobody had done the research, a shortcoming Warren and a few colleagues spent the next decade or so remedying.
I thought of that when I read this take in Slate on Piketty’s book by a software engineer:
“Capital in the Twenty-First Century is a plea for data-driven economics, which indicts the economics profession for naïveté, greed, and myopia…

“To this end, Piketty attacks not only right-wing but also left-wing economics; he repeatedly takes on Marx’s theoretical biases with the same fervor he goes after Milton Friedman. Much of the classic work of economists, from Adam Smith to Karl Marx to Gary Becker to (God help me) Ayn Rand, is unsupported theoretical supposition, and while such work is often useful in conceptualizing problems and interpreting results, you’d have to be quite credulous to take any of them as gospel. Piketty doesn’t.”
These days, argument is more important to most people than facts, and opinion of Piketty is organizing itself across familiar ideological lines, with familiar name-calling and intense debate not over his facts or findings, but over remedies either recommended, implied or just projected. If that’s the extent of the impact, maybe I don’t have to bother reading the book. But I am interested in one of Piketty’s ideas I find most disconcerting: That the golden age of the American middle class, 1945-1975, was a historical anomaly and not one that can be replicated by returning to the policies on taxation and public investment of the time. So maybe I’ll read it after all – or, like most people, I’ll just read about it.